Every Day Interleague Play Creates Bucket List MLB Schedule

Do you know where the next interleague game is? With the new balanced alignment, teams from the American and National leagues have been squaring off on a nightly basis, making it difficult to keep track of these daily showdowns between interleague combatants. The next game could be coming to a ballpark near you. To help clear up some of the confusion, attached to this link is a handy interleague schedule displaying every contest between AL and NL teams in chronological order as well as on an individual team basis.

Tonight’s visit by the Houston Astros to Yankee Stadium isn’t on the interleague schedule because last year’s NL Central cellar dwellers have since taken up occupancy in the basement of the AL West. Yankee fans that haven’t been able to reprogram their baseball consciousness to regard the Astros as an American League opponent need only examine the impact Houston has had on the records of the Bronx Bombers’ potential playoff rivals to slap them back to reality. For a month, the rest of the A.L. has been fattening its win total against the Astros, and tonight, the Yankees get their first chance to fill up.

The novelty of the Astros in the American League will wear off as Houston faces each existing member of the junior circuit for the first time. However, those aren’t the only unique match-ups that will be crossed off baseball’s bucket list schedule this season. Since the advent of interleague play in 1997, every franchise has hosted the other 29 current MLB teams for a regular season game, with only the rare exceptions noted below. And, by the time the season has ended, those nine never “never before seen” match-ups will be whittled down all the way to one.

When the San Diego Padres finally make their first, long awaited trip to Toronto at some unknown date in the future, every pairing of franchises will have been achieved. Even if you extend the exercise to involve each franchise’s current city, when the Twins visit Washington in June, that loop will be closed as well (the Nationals have never visited Oakland and Kansas City, but the Expos did). After 16 seasons of interleague play, there wasn’t much virgin territory left in the MLB schedule to begin with, but thanks to realignment, soon there will be none.